Colleges Market Easy, No-Fee Sell to Applicants

Tuesday

Jan 26, 2010 at 5:16 AM

Taking cues from politics and business, some colleges are sending applications that cut steps and fees.

JACQUES STEINBERG

RICHMOND, Va. — Over the last few years, the tiny College of Saint Rose in Albany has seen applications increase at least 25 percent annually, minority admissions rise and its standing in the U.S. News and World Report rankings climb more than 20 rungs.

Its secret? Lifting a page from the marketing playbook of credit card companies.

Last fall the college sent out 30,000 bright red “Exclusive Scholar Applications” to high school seniors that promised to waive the $40 application fee, invited them to skip the dreaded essay and assured a decision in three weeks. Because the application arrived with the students’ names and other information already filled in, applying required little more than a signature.

More than 100 other colleges and universities paid the same marketing company to send out variations of these fast-track applications last fall, more than a five-fold jump since 2006. Some have spent upward of $1 million on their application campaigns, and many have seen their applicant pools double or even triple in the last two years.

Theirs is a roster that includes well-known institutions like Marquette (which promised a free baseball cap to the first 250 respondents to its “Advantage Application”); Rensselaer Polytechnic (the “Candidate’s Choice Application”) and the University of Minnesota (“the Golden Gopher Fast Application”). Others that have regional reputations — like the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. (the “Distinctive Candidate Application”) — are hoping to raise their national profiles.

While some guidance counselors say they welcome the elimination of application fees — which can be as much as $50 per college — they worry that the express applications may be short-circuiting a storied process in which students search out the colleges that might be the best fit for them.

The counselors also fear that recipients of the applications are being lulled into thinking they have been pre-approved for admittance. In fact, Marquette, with a freshman class of about 1,950, sent out about 40,000 of its “Advantage” applications last year, and will reject about 40 percent of its applicants over all.

Asked about the proliferation of such mailings, Robert Bardwell, a college counselor at Monson High School in western Massachusetts, said: “It’s disheartening that schools have to resort to this. I think they’re dealing with teenagers who don’t know what they want. I worry that they are applying just because it’s free, rather than that they think this might be the school for them.”

It is no coincidence that these marketing campaigns are similar to those in the financial and political worlds. Royall & Company, which designed and sent out most of these application packets from its offices in Richmond, employs several veterans from the direct mail campaigns of long-distance phone providers and banks.

And its founder, Bill Royall, is a former political strategist who played a lead role in a mailing sent to tens of thousands of donors to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, hours after he accepted the Democratic Party nomination in July 1992.

The rise in short-cut applications appears to have two main causes. One is the fractured economy, which has left some colleges scrambling just to fill their freshman classes and to identify applicants who can pay full tuition. But there is also U.S. News and World Report, which puts a premium on big jumps in applications, as well as in applicants’ standardized test scores, in assembling its annual rankings.

Royall helps each college identify potential applicants by buying lists of high school students’ names and addresses from the College Board, based on how they performed on the PSAT or SAT, or on information they provided on their high school class rank, interests or ethnicity.

To Royall and its clients, the subsequent outreach helps students who might not know that a particular college exists. Moreover, the company argues that it is saving applicants precious time at a hectic moment in their lives. (Some colleges’ fast-track applications, for example, encourage students to submit a graded high school paper in lieu of an original essay.)

“People might say this is too easy, it isn’t rigorous enough,” Mr. Royall said. “No one has ever told us that the people applying using these methods are less qualified.”

Mr. Royall said that no college had ever mentioned climbing the U.S. News rankings as a goal. Instead, he said, most engaged his firm because they hoped to increase the quality and diversity of their applicant pools. And the strategy appears to work.

Eduardo Garnica, 19, of Sacramento, said he had expected to attend the University of California, Davis, until he received a “Distinctive Candidate” application from the University of the Pacific, 50 miles away in Stockton.

“I hadn’t been that interested in going there,” he said. “But they made it easy.”

Mr. Garnica said he had been captivated immediately by the words “Waived application fee” and “No required essay!” on the bright orange envelope. Inside, a cover letter congratulated him for having “earned an opportunity that is reserved for only a select few high-priority students.” (In truth, he was one of 30,000 who got the letter.)

He said he was flattered enough to visit, liked what he saw and was later accepted. He enrolled as a freshman this past fall.

Mr. Garnica said he was enjoying the university so much that he was willing to forgive a white lie in its marketing campaign — there is no application fee for anyone applying to Pacific, and thus no fee to waive.

Similarly, Matthew Buck, a 17-year-old high school senior at Monson High School in Massachusetts, whose counselor is Mr. Bardwell, said he had applied this year to York College in Pennsylvania, Wells College in New York, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, largely because they sent him fast-track applications.

Mary Grondahl, vice president of enrollment management at the College of Saint Rose, said she started working with Royall several years ago at least partly to broaden the college’s reach beyond the state’s capitol region and to encourage more young men to apply.

Last year, it paid Royall about $120,000, or $4 per application.

The college credits the company, in large part, for helping increase the percentage of men in last year’s entering freshman class to 35 percent, from 28 percent less than a decade ago.

Meanwhile, the number of enrolled students who hailed from outside the Albany region has increased to 63 percent, a 10-percentage-point gain from just a few years earlier, while the percentage of students who identified themselves as African-American, Asian or Hispanic, rose to 18 percent, from 7 percent, Ms. Grondahl said. Over all, applications climbed to more than 4,000 for the class of about 600 that enrolled in September.

Asked to fix a value on the campaign, Ms. Grondahl said, “It was almost like the MasterCard ad says: priceless.”

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